Douglas Council has submitted new plans for flats and associated parking which includes the site of a former police station.

The application (20/01220/B) updates a previous application from 2016 and expands the site to cover the area from the former police house to the demolished Methodist Church in Willaston.

Under the new application the council would build 48 two-bedroom flats on Snaefell Road in what is already the island’s largest social housing estate.

Despite its size, Willaston does not have many flats available and none that conform to the government’s housing standards document.

Currently Douglas Council has a large waiting list for housing, in September there were 218 people or families on the list. As such, the council’s housing department is confident that it would be able to lease all of the flats with some ease.

The site had been allocated for sheltered housing, however the council’s application says that while it remains committed to providing sheltered housing, this will be found on another site.

As the full length of the site would have created what the council called ’excessive’ corridors, it plans to build the flats in two blocks, each with its own entrance and each being three-and-a-half stories tall.

The council plans for the building include 55 car parking spaces and 64 bicycle storage spaces. It says that ’encouraging active travel at a ratio of 1.3 cycle spaces per unit, it seems reasonable to reduce the parking provision to 1.15 spaces per unit’.

We first reported in July that the council intends to spend up to £9.47m on the new flats. However its proposal to improve public facilities, such as building a new playground were refused by the Department of Infrastructure.

As the DoI refused to support a loan application which included the extra facilities, the council had to drop them. As the time, council leader David Christian called the decision ’disappointing’, particularly for the playground which would have benefited families in the new flats and Willaston as a whole.